9 Best PDF Editors for Linux of 2026

Xodo PDF Studio is the product Qoppa sold for years as PDF Studio, now under the Xodo brand owned by Apryse. It is a desktop editor that runs offline on Windows, macOS and Linux, and Xodo says it covers editing, OCR, conversion, encryption, signing and batch tools. Security features include redaction, password protection, digital signatures and sanitization that strips hidden data and metadata, and the editor can be set up to disable network connections for air-gapped use. Newer additions include automatic form field creation, automatic accessibility tagging and a Semantic Compare tool. The desktop plan costs $9.99 a month billed $119.88 a year, monthly billing is $19.99, and a perpetual license costs $240 per user. A three-day trial needs a card, while a free demo watermarks saved files. For Linux users it is the closest thing to a full commercial editor without running Windows software.

Master PDF Editor from Code Industry is a long-running desktop editor that ships the same version, 5.9.99, for Linux, Windows and macOS. It edits existing text with font, size and color changes, inserts and moves images and objects, and handles page work such as merging, splitting, rotating, inserting and resizing. Form tools cover buttons, text fields and checkboxes, with JavaScript calculation and validation and dynamic XFA support. OCR makes scanned pages searchable and editable, annotation tools include sticky notes, measuring tools, shapes and custom stamps, and you can sign with a digital certificate and check signatures. The Full Version costs $79.95 per license for one to nine users, falling to $59.95 at 100 or more. That license is perpetual for the version you buy and includes a year of updates and email support; later years cost 50 percent of the price. The demo has every feature but watermarks output files.

ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors is a free office suite for Linux, Windows and macOS, and its PDF editor is one of the few free tools on Linux that edits existing PDF text rather than only drawing over it. ONLYOFFICE lists editing of text, images and objects, page reordering and rotation, headers, footers and watermarks. Review tools cover comments, highlights, freehand drawing, shapes and stamps, and you can fill in forms or build fillable PDF forms from scratch. Security tools include permanent redaction and password protection. Because the same app opens DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files, Ubuntu users who receive both Office documents and PDFs can handle them in one place. Optional AI tools can connect to any provider, including local models, and the app links to cloud platforms such as Nextcloud and ownCloud for real-time co-editing. The trade-off is size: it installs a whole office suite.

Okular is the document viewer from KDE, released under the GPLv2+ license and updated with each KDE Gear release; version 26.08 shipped in August 2026. It is not a full editor, because it cannot change a PDF's original text, but it covers two of the most common tasks for Linux users well. Annotation mode adds inline and popup notes, highlights, underlines and your own text. Signature support lets you view and verify digital signatures embedded in PDFs, see whether a file changed after signing, and sign PDFs yourself with a certificate. Okular also opens EPub, DjVU, Markdown, comics and images, and includes thumbnail and contents panels for long files. It installs from Discover, GNOME Software, most distribution stores or Flathub, and on KDE desktops it is often present already. For anyone who just needs to mark up and sign documents, it costs nothing and adds no watermarks.

Stirling PDF is an open-source PDF toolkit that you can use in the browser, install as a desktop app or host on your own server. Its free plan for individuals lists 60+ PDF tools and 1,000 monthly credits for automating PDF work, with no card required, and the desktop apps are free on Windows, Mac and Linux. On Linux the desktop build runs as a Java .jar file, which works across distributions but feels less native than a .deb package. Self-hosting is the main draw for privacy-minded users: the editor runs on your machine and the source is public, so sensitive files do not go to a third-party website. Teams pay $99 a month for 100 users, which adds single sign-on, a shared workspace and central control of which tools are available. Enterprise adds air-gapped deployment, SCIM and audit logs at a custom price. Automation beyond the included credits costs one cent per credit.

Sejda PDF Desktop brings the tools of the Sejda web app to a desktop install, with Linux packages in .deb and .rpm formats alongside Mac and Windows builds. It edits existing text, letting you add, change or move text and switch the font type, size and style, and it can insert, reorder and delete pages and add signatures. Other tools merge and split by pages, size, bookmarks or text, compress files, convert PDFs to Word, Excel and images, and run OCR. The free version allows 3 tasks per day on documents up to 50 MB and 200 pages, with OCR limited to 10 pages and conversions one file at a time; Pro removes those limits. Sejda no longer sells perpetual licenses, and the pricing page showed euros from our location, so the USD price check is pending. For occasional edits on Ubuntu, the free tier may be all you need.

Xournal++ is an open-source note-taking app that treats a PDF as a page you can write on. You can annotate on top of PDFs with pens, highlighters and shapes, select text from the background PDF to copy, highlight, underline or strike it through, and follow links in the original file. It supports pressure-sensitive styluses from Wacom, Huion and XP-Pen, and adds a built-in LaTeX editor for equations and audio recording tied to what you write. Finished pages export to PDF, SVG and PNG. On Linux the stable v1.3.8 release comes as AppImage, Flatpak, Snap and .deb packages. The catch is the file model: notes save in a .xopp file that points to the original PDF instead of embedding it, so moving or deleting the PDF breaks the background until you export. It does not edit the PDF's own text or fill forms.

PDFsam, short for PDF Split and Merge, has offered a free desktop tool since 2006. PDFsam Basic is open source and works fully offline, with no sign-up, watermarks or file size limits. It merges PDFs while keeping bookmarks and interactive forms, splits at page numbers, bookmark levels or file size, extracts and rotates pages, and mixes two files page by page, which helps with single-sided scanners. PDFsam Visual is the paid step up on Linux, shipped as a .deb package and a portable archive. It adds more than 25 tools, including visual page organizing, compression, cropping, metadata cleaning, flattening, splitting when text changes and AES 256 encryption, and offers a 14-day trial; its merge and some split tools stay free after the trial. The full editor, PDFsam Enhanced, is Windows only, so Linux users should treat PDFsam as a page tool rather than a text editor.

PDF Arranger is a small Python and GTK application that helps you merge or split PDF documents and rotate, crop and rearrange their pages through a visual interface. It is a front end for the pikepdf library and a fork of Konstantinos Poulios's older PDF-Shuffler, released under the GPL-3.0 license and developed in the open on GitHub. The appeal is focus: you drag page thumbnails into the order you want, delete or rotate the ones you do not need, and save a new file, without a large suite or a browser upload. Because it uses GTK 3, it fits GNOME and other GTK desktops. That focus is also the limit. PDF Arranger does not edit text, annotate, fill forms, run OCR or sign, so most users pair it with Okular or ONLYOFFICE. As a community project it offers no paid support.